An Ethiopian Airlines flight carrying 149 passengers and eight crew members crashed early Sunday shortly after departing from the Ethiopian capital, Addis Ababa, en route to Nairobi, Kenya, the airline said. A spokesman for the airline told state television that there were no survivors.

The flight on Sunday took off from Bole International Airport in Addis Ababa at 8:38 a.m. local time and lost contact six minutes later, the airline said. The plane is believed to have gone down near Bishoftu, southeast of Addis Ababa, the airline said in a statement.

“I came to the airport to receive my brother but I have been told there is a problem,” said Agnes Muilu, at Jomo Kenyatta International Airport in Nairobi, The Associated Press reported. “I just pray that he is safe or he was not on it.”

The flight was carrying passengers from 33 countries; a spokesman for Ethiopian Airlines said that the dead included 32 Kenyans and 17 Ethiopians. The Global Times, a state-run Chinese newspaper, said that eight Chinese citizens were onboard.

The office of Abiy Ahmed, the Ethiopian prime minister, expressed condolences on Twitter, as did President Uhuru Kenyatta of Kenya.

The Kenyan transport secretary, James Macharia, said his country was setting up two emergency response centers to assist those who had friends and relatives on the flight.

“The purpose of these centers is to provide the relatives with information as much as we have,” he said. “At the same time to provide them with an environment of privacy.”

There has not been a crash involving Ethiopian Airlines since January 2010, when a Boeing 737 crashed into the Mediterranean Sea shortly after it took off from Beirut, Lebanon. None of the 90 people onboard that flight — 82 passengers and eight crew members — survived.

The latest known accident involving the airline was in January 2015 when a Boeing 737-400 cargo aircraft veered off the runway with flat tires after it landed in Accra, Ghana. None of the three crew members onboard were injured.

The Lion Air Max 8 in Indonesia was a brand-new plane, like Ethiopian Airlines Flight 302, which was delivered to the African carrier late last year, according to websites that track commercial fleet updates. Crashes involving new planes are rare. The Lion Air accident also involved a plane that crashed minutes after takeoff.

Investigations by Indonesian and American aviation authorities have determined that the Lion Air plane’s abrupt nose-dive may have been caused by updated Boeing software that is meant to prevent a stall but that can send the plane into a fatal descent if the altitude and angle information being fed into the computer system is incorrect.

The change in the flight control system, which can override manual motions in the Max model, was not adequately explained to pilots, American aviation authorities concluded. Global alerts were sent to notify pilots flying the Max about how to counter the anti-stall system.

Boeing said in a statement on Twitter that a technical team was ready to provide assistance at the request of the United States National Transportation Safety Board.

Ethiopia, with about 100 million people, is the second-most populous nation in Africa. After elections in March, the new prime minister has embarked on a series of political reforms, chiefly to officially end two decades of hostilities with Eritrea, a neighboring country and longtime rival.

The country’s flagship carrier has undergone a major expansion in past years, more than doubling its staff to 11,000 employees in the past decade, with the goal of easing air travel in a part of the world where flying is notoriously complicated. For instance, it added nonstop flights from Newark to Lomé, Togo, a hub for the airline, that then continued on to Addis Ababa.

In West Africa, Ethiopian is the technical and strategic partner for a relatively new airline, Asky, created with investment from the Economic Community of West African States. Asky offers a web of cross-border flights in West and Central Africa and connects with Ethiopian flights to expand its reach across the continent and beyond.

In Africa, Ethiopian has a reputation for having a newer fleet than other airlines, for operating flights that are mostly on time and for having accommodating schedules.

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